I've just released a white paper with some info on using the encryption and random number generation hardware accelerators in the POWER7+ CPU in Fedora Linux. It covers a few areas:
1. Background on the hardware and software architecture

2. Setting up Fedora to use the accelerators for disk encryption and IPSec
3. How to monitor that you're really getting hardware acceleration

Hope you find it useful, and don't hesitate to send me questions or comments!

Yeah, lots of packages have been updated and so forth but there are two interesting pieces I'd like to draw some attention towards. Firstly, adoption of grub2 continues in the beta. We smoothed out some of the rough edges since the alpha timeframe and have a number of additional patches we'll push as well.

Secondly is that rpm and yum now are equipped to deal with a ppc64p7 subarch. I'll write up more on this topic as we near or pass Fedora 17 General Availability, but the basic function is that we have a POWER7 subarch (akin to i686 for x86) where certain optimizations are passed to the binary rpms. This is an exciting time for the architecture and Fedora!

Fedora 16 has now been officially released! The release notes can be found at:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_16_PPC_release_notes

Most of the imperfections mentioned in the release notes are around graphics/video cards. This is something that will be looked at closer in upcoming Fedora releases. Most significantly, this marks the first official Fedora release for ppc64 since the Fedora 12 time frame. Our preliminary feedback on Fedora for ppc64 has been positive. There a number of instances where it is being used heavily in open source projects.

Please feel free to try out the latest Fedora version and the team is always looking for new members who are wiling to hack for the better of Linux ppc64.

There are many improvements between the Alpha and Beta for ppc64. Many of them revolve around automated console detection for IBM ppc64 hardware. The desktop is also improved and we now have a functioning Firefox.

This is a community-based effort and as
such we encourage folks to participate. The best mechanism to speak
with the team behind this effort is via IRC, where we hang out on
freenode in #fedora-ppc.

By: Robert MacFarlan. IBM, in collaboration with the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University, has contributed access to a new POWER7 server for use by the GCC development community. Quoting the email list announcement the configuration looks like:

"The server is an IBM Power 730 Express server configured with 16 POWER7 cores
each with 4 hardware threads at 3.55 GHz, 64 GB of RAM and a few TB of disk.
It is running Fedora Core 16 alpha."

I just wanted to bring some attention
to the recent announcement around a Fedora 16 Alpha for ppc64.
Detials can be found in the release announcement. While this is only an Alpha, it has proven to be a rather decent
effort and quite stable.

This is a community-based effort and as
such we encourage folks to participate. The best mechanism to speak
with the team behind this effort is via IRC, where we hang out on
freenode in #fedora-ppc.

For those interested, the default
userland is 64-bit. It can also run 32-bit binaries and yum (the
“wrapper” admin tool around rpm) does an excellent job of
resolving dependencies for package installation. Suppose you want to
install a package called “foo”, you can perform any of the
following:

yum install foo (which will
install the 64bit version of foo)

yum install foo.ppc64 (same as
above)

yum install foo.ppc (which will
install the 32bit version of foo)

Fedora, and this alpha, is a a great
way to see trends in the Linux community operating systems (for which
the Enterprise Linux distributions generally follow). One example is
the incorporation of things like systemd, the new style of System and
Service manager. If you have packages with init daemons and the
like, running things like this alpha will help you get ready for full
support of systemd.

I'll continue to post more information
on Fedora for ppc64 in the future. My hope is to not only bring
status but perhaps introduce new functions, tips, and techniques for
users of Fedora.

Calling all Debian junkies!!! The PowerLinux family of Linux community distributions is being extended to include Debian. Feel free to chip in on the development effort.

For those who like technical details, this port is 64-bit only (no 32-bit application support), runs only IBMs newest POWER8 processors, and begins life supporting the new OPAL firmware which runs under KVM on Power.

We have a great start and would love assistance from anyone who wants to help!!!﻿

There are of course a number of other communities being worked, encouraged, and planned. I am in the process of gathering more details and will update this post as I get more information from colleagues and friends.

Fedora has made their alpha release for Fedora 17 on ppc64 available. The release notes are publicly available and describe where to get the content (.iso). If you are familiar with the Fedora, please make sure you read the release notes because the initial loading of the installation image is significantly different than past releases and impacts things like network-based install.

Fedora 17 is the second release for the ppc64 architecture and is proving to be quite stable. Feel free to grab a copy and give it a try. And, the beta release is right around the corner.